It's Friday, which means we could all use a touch of cosmic amazement to kick-start our work-numbed souls. Cue NASA's fantastic art showing the star-making machinery at the core of the galaxy. Even more of it below.

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This image, which appeared as NASA's Image of the Day the other day, is not actually a photograph of the Arches star cluster, just to be clear. But it is an artist's impression, based on new infrared impressions from the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes, which managed to pierce the dusty core of our galaxy and capture images of this luminous cluster of about 2,000 stars. This is the densest known gathering of young stars in our galaxy. And here's the even more majestic version: